OK, the Xe3 GPU in Intel's Panther Lake chip officially isn't Celestial, it's really just Xe2 'Plus

Intel's Tom [[link]] Petersen Talks Xe3 Gaming, Making A Better GPU & More | The Full Nerd ep. 370 - YouTube

The utterly just got a bit clearer. Oh, and a whole lot more confusing, too. In a nutshell, the Xe3 iGPU in the new Panther Lake chip definitely isn't based on Celestial, Intel's supposed next-gen graphics architecture. Instead it's a tweak of Xe2, as seen in the and the Lunar Lake laptop chip. We kinda knew that, but now it's [[link]] absolutely official. But even Intel itself doesn't yet understand how it all relates to the new collab' with Nvidia on PC graphics. Yes, really.

, Intel's long suffering graphics rep Tom Petersen has had another stab at clarifying the confusion that's resulted [[link]] from Intel's recent Panther Lake tech day and . You know, the one that revealed the iGPU in Panther Lake was indeed Xe3-based, but didn't even mention the Celestial architecture that had hitherto to been synonymous with Xe3 and also indicated that the Xe3 iGPU in Panther Lake would be branded "B" series, which up until now had been aligned with the Xe2 architecture.

In short, it was all utterly baffling. Over to Petersen in response to the question of whether Xe3 in Panther Lake is Celestial? "Ah, no, it's actually not."

He continues: "Xe3 got named a long time ago. Think of Xe3 as mostly similar to Xe2. It's evolutionary off Xe2 and if you were completely transparently naming these things, you probably would have called it Xe2 Prime or Xe2 Plus Plus." Er, OK!

"Unfortunately that Xe3 name got decided years ago, it's actually spread around the Linux stack. Changing the name of that would have been very, very painful. So, that's why you're seeing this disjointedness abut Intel Arc "B" series. Well, [Panther Lake] is B series because it's similar to Xe2 and we want to be transparent with our customers. Panther Lake has a new and improved GPU, that GPU is bigger and it's very similar to B series."

If that's clear enough, the next question is then what happened to Celestial. Petersen was on this very podcast last year . How does all that fit in with Panther Lake and that slide?

"What I said was the architecture team was done for Celestial, the next big architecture. They were already done and they are done, and the first instance of a lot of the work they did is Xe3P," Petersen says.

Yup, Xe3P as shown in that slide and as used in Intel's new data centre AI inferencing GPU, . So, XeP3 is Celestial and we'll see it in a new desktop GPU?

"It's the next one, the next one," is all Petersen will say. "And we already announced a design using that, which is a data centre design," he says, referring Crescent Island.

Pushed again in the future of desktop Intel graphics cards, her replies, "I try not to talk about future unreleased products. So, from my perspective, I know that we've announced an Xe3P architecture, and that is a more substantially different architecture than Xe3 was from Xe2."

Pressed once more on the status of the much rumoured Intel Arc B770 board, he says, "I don't talk about unreleased products and I try not to hint either, because things change."

Speaking of change, one big change that you get the feeling Petersen and the rest of the Arc team didn't see coming is the . How the heck does that fit in with Intel's own graphics tech? Does it mean the end for Intel Arc?

"I don't think it's understood yet. I would expect Intel to develop graphics IP for the long term. There's times when you want a smaller more efficient IP and there's times when you want a larger more complex IP. Maybe there are multiple different segments.

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"There are also data centre designs. We just announced our brand new XE3P architecture going into a data centre GPU [again, that's Crescent Island] and that's all part of one great big IP enabling effort that we do," he says.

So, there you have it. Or don't have it. Xe3 definitely isn't Celestial. It's kind of Xe2, but with some tweaks, . And Xe3P is sort of Celestial, or at least the first example of the work the Celestial team did. But Intel isn't calling it Celestial and Celestial at least as a naming convention is dead. And even Intel itself doesn't know how the Nvidia deal will impact Arc graphics.

If we had to read between the lines, it looks like for the PC Intel Arc graphics could be relegated to a low-end role, even in the context of integrated GPUs. So, that doesn't bode well at all for Arc desktop cards. Meanwhile, Intel wants to get in on the AI gravy train, so it will develop its own products for inferencing. But on the balance of probabilities, that GPU technology probably won't translate into graphics cards for desktop gaming PCs. But of course as Petersen says, all of that is subject to change.

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